After the fight is over, two of these issues will be suspended, while the other two move on to the next round.
Remember that the coders will not take part in the discussion, so make your arguments complete, concise and convincing - when it's over, it's over.

Part of that is clearly marking what outcome you support for which issue.
There should be no ambiguity in the issue you're talking about, and it should be clear what outcome you support. Feel free to put your stance in bold, and use simple terminology like "kill #69" or "I want #42 to survive".
This use of simple terminology should be part of a larger argumentation - if this is all your post consists of, it will be ignored. We are interested in argumentations and details to consider, not votes.

A decision will be made either way, a lack of discussion will not cause all issues to live.

Be friendly, be civil, be logical.
You are allowed to try to deconstruct the arguments of those arguing against your candidate, but remember that they don't make the call - there is really no point in getting personal.

The discussion should be contained in this thread, argumentations elsewhere will be ignored, but you are allowed to transfer and adapt points made elsewhere in the past.

We want a good, clean fight.
Let's get it on!

These fights are largely automatically generated - if an issue turns out to be unfit for combat, it will be disqualified and the opponent will go into the queue.

Support 322, NonVehicle needs fixing (or preffereable splitting) to make several already existing features work correctly rather than just the one of upgrades. In addition, Upgrades still have 2 requests which are pretty much equivalent in terms of what will actually get implemented in the contest and the second one is already getting losts of love in another thread.

I also support 609 since its already possible to control the sort order to some extent based on tech levels, cost and such. The few things I'd like to control pale in comparison to 609.

Fight 1
Let me start by saying that I find Beowulf's assertion that "609 will make 596 possible and then some" rather ridiculous. There is absolutely no basis for that claim, especially since it hasn't even been decided yet whether to implement #609, so no implementation details are decided yet, either.

Anyway, none of the posts in the discussion even mention #724, let alone support it, and ICS is 3 for #724 against 13 for #609.

It's rather clear which one the community prefers.

Kill: #724Support: #609

Fight 2
#322 does have more ICS, and Blade is correct when he says that there are other upgrade requests left - however, this is the last round; there is no guarantee any of the other requests survive, and there will be no other chance. To kill #596 on the vague possibility that a related request in the same area might survive would be unfair.

#596 will be judged on its own merit.

And I must say, looking at both next to each other, #596 looks to be vastly, vastly more important than #322.
Fully-functional upgrades would enable hitherto unseen variation and complexity for BuildingTypes.
A fixed NonVehicle would...prevent specific vehicles to be lifted. And stop hijackers on specific vehicles.

Let's be honest here: CarryAlls work, in general. Hijackers work, in general. It's not like anything is not functional because NonVehicle doesn't work. Yes, it's a little annoying that you can't make an exception for a few VehicleTypes here and there, but overall, it's not like it overly impedes the use of those game logics.

Choosing #322 would mean making an existing logic a tiny, tiny bit better.
Choosing #596 would mean making an existing logic drastically better, allowing a wide range of new usage cases.

As much as I agree it'd be nice if #322 were fixed, #596 is just more important, imo.

Kill: #322Support: #596

Ultimately, with the post-0.2 release cycle, you can always just go and lobby for #322 to become a developer's minor feature for a release.

Fight 1
The winner of this fight is indeed quite clear. Researches got supporters, sort order doesn't. So, I won't say more here than this: Researches.

Fight 2
I don't know. Upgrading would be a good feature, but it has three supporters here and four people support the NonVehicle tag. In the tracker it has no supporters and NonVehicle got some despite it being the older issue. I vote for NonVehicle to be fixed instead of implementing a new system.